London - Edward Rutherfurd [581]
It was Frederick who provided it
When Hitler had come to power in Germany, like many people in the western world Helen had supposed that it was probably a good thing. “His supporters are unpleasant,” they agreed, “but he does seem to be a bulwark against communist Russia.” As he strengthened his rule and ugly rumours about the character of his regime spread, she had chosen to discount them. As for his military intentions, when the rogue politician Churchill, still disappointed to be out of office, started his campaign for rearmament, she had believed her own MP. “Churchill’s insane,” he said. “Germany can’t fight a war for twenty years.”
During one of his fleeting visits to London, Frederick disabused her. He had been sent as a military attaché to the British embassy in Poland the year before and his assessment was blunt. “Firstly, Churchill is right. Hitler is rearming and means to go to war. Secondly, my dear Helen, this is news only to the English at home. Every embassy in Europe knows it perfectly well. Every military attaché, including myself, has been filing detailed reports which London is studiously ignoring. Our attaché in Berlin, a brilliant man, has just been sacked for reporting the German troop movements that he saw. Those politicians who know this either think the public won’t stand for the truth, or have persuaded themselves they’ve done a deal with Hitler. The whole thing’s a scandal!”
“The MP I work for says Germany won’t be ready to fight for twenty years,” objected Helen.
“That’s the received wisdom. It’s based on a first-rate report done by the War Office. There’s only one problem – the report was written in 1919.”
She had started to gather information after that. Friends in the army, a diplomat she knew, even one or two sympathetic people in Westminster had given her facts which corroborated her brother’s charges. She and Violet built up a detailed dossier. Some of their friends thought them a little mad; others, remembering Violet’s militant past, smiled and shrugged. Among the other secretaries in Westminster, most of whom came from families like her own, her cause became known as “Helen’s crusade”, and she soon discovered that several of them had relatives in the diplomatic corps who felt the same way. “You should talk to your boss about it like I do,” she would say. “After all, he is in Parliament and you see him every day.” Once she even tried to speak to the Prime Minister herself. When the abdication crisis of 1936 had come up, and everyone else was talking about the new king and Mrs Simpson, Helen shrugged. “I’m sorry for him, of course,” she declared. “But it hardly matters if Hitler is going to invade.”
It was not surprising that there were complaints. “You’re upsetting people,” her boss explained to her, “and agitating the other girls. I must ask you to stop.”
“I can’t,” she said.
She was out of a job. She looked for another in Westminster but found nothing. She decided to travel and spent some months touring on the Continent, in particular in Germany. She intended to write a little book about it, but within a month of her return, the great crisis of Europe had begun and, just as she had feared, the country drifted towards war.
When it came, she had volunteered to drive an ambulance. It was frightening, of course, and dangerous, but she did not mind. “I’m single, mother,” she had remarked the previous week. “So if someone has to get killed, it really may as well be me.”
London had never seen anything like Hitler’s terrible Blitzkrieg before. Many had predicted that a war with